1862 Battle of Williamsburg: An iconic clash between the blue and gray

Civil War in Hampton Roads: 1862 Battle of Williamsburg

Battle of Williamsburg, Between the Blue and Gray

Battle of Williamsburg, Between the Blue and Gray

Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com | 757-247-4783

The Battle of Williamsburg was nearly 10 hours old and showing signs of winding down when the gray-clad soldiers of the 24th Virginia Infantry erupted from a York County wood and hurled themselves across a broad wheat field.

A mile to their right, the chaotic daylong struggle in the rain, smoke and mud had already ground up more than 3,000 dead, wounded and missing men — and only a preposterously heroic charge led by a one-armed Union general had saved the exhausted left wing of the Army of the Potomac from disaster.

But as grim as the clash in the Bloody Ravine had been, the brutal fight that unfolded in the knee-high wheat at Redoubt 11 would add still more steel and blood to a telling if too often forgotten battle.

In just 23 minutes of combat, a little-known Union brigade commander would show the same grit and nerve that made him a hero at Gettysburg — and tagged "Hancock the Superb" as one of the North's best generals, says Carson Hudson, author of "Civil War Williamsburg."

The 24th would be joined by the 5th North Carolina in a valiant but doomed assault that foreshadowed Pickett's famous charge — and which soldiers on both sides later singled out as unusually heroic even by Civil War standards.

When the shooting stopped, more than 200 Virginians lay dead and wounded in the York County mud — leaving only half the unit standing. Just 75 of the 415 Tar Heels who stormed the stubborn Union line reported at roll call the next morning.

Many of the fallen are believed to lie in unmarked graves on an elbow of wooded land bounded by I-64 and the Colonial Parkway. Though largely undisturbed since their deaths, it's been marked for mixed-use development.

"Williamsburg was an accidental battle. The outcome wasn't clear-cut. And partly because of that its significance has been overlooked," Hudson says.

"But if you look at the figures who stood out on the battlefield, this is where the war started to sort out who was brave, who was a coward — who was good, and who wasn't — in the two most important armies of the Civil War, and every soldier here knew it."

Nobody expected the fight that broke out near Williamsburg after the Confederate army abandoned its Warwick River defenses on the night of May 3, 1862 and began retreating west toward Richmond.

Doggedly pursued by Union cavalry, Brig. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's rear guard narrowly escaped after a clash outside town late the following day. So serious was the looming threat that Gen. Joseph E. Johnston wheeled one of his divisions around and ordered it to man a string of earthen forts that stretched from Kingsmill on the James River to Queens Creek on the York.

Taking up their posts in the dark and rain, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet's men didn't know the terrain or the defenses that had been occupied by other units well on their way to Richmond. And when Union Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Hooker launched a fierce but badly coordinated attack early on May 5, no one in gray realized that the outermost redoubts had been forgotten.

"Longstreet literally didn't know how far his line extended," Hudson says, "or that these forts existed."

For much of the fragmented battle that crucial oversight didn't matter.

Hooker's dangerous attack on the Confederate right commanded all the attention as his men ground forward in an attempt to cross a tangled belt of felled trees under heavy fire.

Blinding rain, broken ground and an uphill climb added to the perils of the assault across the Bloody Ravine. But the Union men still pushed the Southerners back into their redoubts and the main fortification at Fort Magruder.

After hours of close, hard fighting, however, Hooker's exhausted troops found themselves stranded with little ammunition and no sign of support from a division that waited with its arms stacked in the woods only a mile away. So they fell back, then crumbled under an assault led by Gens. George Pickett and A.P. Hill.

If not for a Union band that stopped to play "Yankee Doodle" and the national anthem, the wavering blue line might have dissolved. But then they rallied with a cheer, sparking a roaring reply from 2,000 mud-splattered troops just arrived from Yorktown.

"I'm a one-armed Jersey son-of-a-gun! Follow me!" Brig. Gen. Phillip Kearny yelled as he took his horse's reins in his teeth, extended his sword and led a bruising counter-assault.

"Kearny was such a terrific leader. He saved the Union left flank," says Carol Kettenburg Dubbs, author of "Defend this Old Town: Williamsburg During the Civil War."

"It's too bad — for the North, at least — that he was killed a few months later."

Looking on from his vantage point on the Union right, Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock may have been the only commander on either side to see so much of the battle.

But he and his 3,400 men — who had marched wide to the right and then crossed back over a narrow mill dam in a column only four soldiers wide — also waited hours for the reinforcements needed to menace the wide-open Confederate flank.

Three times Union commander Maj. Gen. Edwin V. Sumner sent units to bolster Hancock's exposed force. Three times his fear of an attack on his center led him to call them back.

"Put yourself in Sumner's position," Dubbs says. "He could hear the sound of battle all around him. But he couldn't see it because there were so many trees. So he was being very careful."

Despite his worrisome numbers, Hancock leapfrogged from an unmanned redoubt overlooking an arm of Queens Creek to another fort 1,200 yards closer to the Confederate center.

He then deployed his men 600 yards in front of the redoubt and began shelling Fort Magruder.

Instead of dispatching reinforcements, however, Sumner ordered Hancock to withdraw. The cursing Pennsylvanian sent officer after officer back to plead for more men while he found ways to stall.

On the Confederate side of the line, the Union threat went unchallenged until Hancock — scorning a Southern signalman's query — hoisted the Stars and Stripes atop Redoubt 11.

So sharp was Hancock's subsequent cannon fire that Longstreet had to call on Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill's division retreating west of Williamsburg for help.

Joining the 24th Virginia under Brig. Gen. Jubal Early — who had double-timed down Duke of Gloucester Street from the College of William and Mary — Hill sent the 5th N.C. and two more regiments through a thick, tangled wood toward the sound of Hancock's guns. But so difficult and disorienting was the trek that the gray line broke apart, losing the two middle units, Dubbs says.

The first to emerge was the 24th, which charged into the wheat field without waiting. Badly out of position, they found themselves exposed to punishing flanking fire that toppled Early with a bloody neck wound. Yet still they wheeled left in a perilous charge, encouraged by the sight of Hancock's men pulling back as he took up a better defensive line before the redoubt.

The 5th N.C. saw the apparent retreat, too, as they burst from the woods far to the right and rushed toward comrades. But instead of scattering before the yelled taunts of "Ball's Bluff! Bull Run!", the Federals turned and fired, then rolled the gray tide back at the last second with a crushing counter-charge.

"It was so well-timed," Dubbs says. "It was the deciding point of the battle."

Long after Williamsburg had been eclipsed by bigger, more famous clashes, soldiers on both sides recalled the heroism of the Confederate charge and the ferocity of the Union stand as landmark moments.

Hill never looked back on the slaughter without pain. And even after withstanding Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, Hancock called the assault "immortal."

"Williamsburg was the bloodiest battle that had been seen in the east to that day," historian John V. Quarstein says.